Five of Swords
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as a conflict won at too high a price, with winners who lose something and losers who walk away. Waite tied it to degradation and loss.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as reconciliation, regret, or the wish to make amends after a quarrel.
A question to sit with
Is winning this argument worth what it would cost? Who walked away from the last one, and what was left unsaid?
The deeper reading
Traditionally the mind that prizes being right over being at peace.
What is drawn on the card
A smirking man gathers up swords while two dejected figures walk away toward the water. Two more swords lie on the ground under a jagged, windswept sky.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A disdainful man looks after two retreating, dejected figures whose swords lie on the ground; he carries two on his left shoulder and a third in his right hand, point to earth, master of the field.
- Suit
- Swords
- Element
- Air
- Domain
- Mind, conflict, truth, communication
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Five of Swords is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.